Question: What does CNN’s Jim Acosta crave more than anything? If you said “attention,” go to the head of the class. It’s a mystery why the White House has given Acosta way more than that. By yanking his “hard pass” after last week’s press conference (don’t ask who was obnoxious; they all were), Acosta has literally become a federal case. CNN filed suit claiming that its reporter’s First and Fifth Amendment rights were violated. More than a dozen news organizations, including Fox, have filed amicus briefs supporting CNN, and even Trump-friendly Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano has opined that Acosta has a strong case. Mr. Showboat is just where he wants to be — the center of attention — but thanks to President Trump’s gratuitous swipe, he is also a free-press martyr.

Acosta’s technique has been honed for many months — asking questions not to receive answers but to shame. At the November 7 press conference, Acosta rose to “challenge” the president on what he had said about the caravan during the closing days of the campaign. “As you know Mr. President, the caravan was not an invasion. It’s a group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the border with the U.S.”

It’s not Acosta’s job to joust with the president over interpretations of words. Leave that to commentators or politicians.

He could have asked the president where he got his information about Middle Eastern terrorists infiltrating into the caravan, or

what his evidence was that there were many criminals in its ranks.

He might have asked what purpose U.S. troops would serve at the border in light of the Posse Comitatus Act.

He could have asked whether the president thought any of the migrants might have colorable asylum claims.

Instead, he demanded: “Do you think you demonized immigrants?”

Frankly, if Acosta thinks the president demonized immigrants, let him write an op-ed. A press conference is supposed to be about eliciting information. Acosta doesn’t practice journalism so much as performance art.

.. The White House handled this mosquito in about the worst possible way. The president could have declined to call on him. Having called on him and been offended by his tone, the president could have refused to take the bait, saying “You might want to run for office yourself. In the meantime, I’ll call on someone who wants to ask a question, not stage a debate.”

.. Instead, in a fit of petulance, the White House revoked Acosta’s press pass. This is Trump not understanding the import of the office he holds. When Trump the businessman took swipes at press coverage he disliked, it was pique. When the president of the United States does it, it smacks of authoritarianism. Admittedly, the press corps are a high-strung bunch, but this White House

flirts with intimidation,

calling down contempt for them at rallies,

deriding them as the “enemy of the people” (which is an echo of Stalin,

whether Trump recognizes it or not), threatening to sic the FTC on the owner of the Washington Post, and elevating the likes of Gateway Pundit.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who cannot be much more honest than her boss and hope to keep her job, issued a tweet explaining that Acosta was exiled because he had accosted the intern who attempted to remove the mic from his hands. “President Trump believes in a free press and expects and welcomes tough questions of him and his Administration. We will, however, never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern. . . .”

Anyone who watched the exchange — or looked it up on YouTube — knew that this was risible. Yet Sanders said it anyway and even released a video that had been slightly doctored (by speeding it up) to make it seem that Acosta had been physically swatting at the intern.

Within a few days, Sanders changed her tune, claiming instead that the White House cannot run a smooth press conference if reporters hog the mic. But let’s pause to consider where this White House has settled. Covering up for an intemperate retaliation against a journalist, the spokesman for the president of the United States attempted to rewrite the history that we had all seen with our own eyes just days before.

Ben Shapiro and the future of American conservatism

.. the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations.”

.. More important, though, is what Shapiro’s celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.

Shapiro owes a lot to social media. His appearances on Fox News Channel are not the cause but the consequence of his fame. It is by searching YouTube that teenagers come across his debates with campus lefties, his speeches, his appearances on like-minded podcasts, and his extended interviews with friends and other members of the so-called intellectual dark web.

.. Shapiro is a conservative pundit for a dis-intermediated age.

.. They are more interested in debating social and cultural issues than the problems of government or the midterm elections. They have a snarky sense of humor that appreciates the irony in trolling the Left or “owning the libs.”

.. Nor is their consumption of media limited to conservative sources. They are well aware of the critiques of the right from the mainstream media and comedy hosts, and even laugh at some of the jokes on SNL and John Oliver.

.. The issue that motivates these young people is political correctness:

its denial of differences between the sexes, its

reduction of identity to ethnic and racial ancestry, its

stultifying effect on intellectual inquiry and free speech.

For them, President Trump and the constellation of social and political problems with which he is associated are secondary to larger questions of cultural and academic freedom.

.. Nor does he shy away from responding to the nostrums of identity politics in these hostile settings. His willingness to debate, indeed his readiness for polemical combat, generates excitement and attracts followers to his cause.

.. Shapiro is someone that both Trump’s right-leaning opponents and right-minded friends respect. Even a few liberals are willing to entertain his ideas — until they are shamed into denouncing him, of course.

.. Ben Shapiro resembles no one so much as the young William F. Buckley Jr.

My gut reaction is that these student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail.

.. I came of age in the 1980s. In that time, there was an assumption that though the roots of human society were deep in tribalism, over the past 3,000 years we have developed a system of liberal democracy that gloriously transcended it, that put reason, compassion and compromise atop violence and brute force.

.. sophisticated people in those days wanted to be seen, to use Scott Alexander’s term, as mistake theorists. Mistake theorists believe that the world is complicated and most of our troubles are caused by error and incompetence, not by malice or evil intent.

.. Mistake theorists also believe that most social problems are hard and that obvious perfect solutions are scarce. Debate is essential. You bring different perspectives and expertise to the table. You reduce passion and increase learning. Basically, we’re all physicians standing over a patient with a very complex condition and we’re trying to collectively figure out what to do.

.. The idea for decades was that racial justice would come when we reduced individual bigotry — the goal was colorblind individualism. As Nils Gilman argues in The American Interest, that ideal reached its apogee with the election of Barack Obama.

.. But Obama’s election also revealed the limits of that ideal. Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure.

.. Progress is less about understanding and liking each other and more about smashing structures that others defend.

.. The second thing that happened was that reason, apparently, ceased to matter. Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism — what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever.

These students were raised with the idea that individual reason is downstream from group identity. Then along came the 2016 election to validate that point of view! If reason and deliberation are central to democracy, how on earth did Donald Trump get elected?

.. If you were born after 1990, it’s not totally shocking that you would see public life as an inevitable war of tribe versus tribe. It’s not surprising that you would become, in Scott Alexander’s terminology, a conflict theorist, not a mistake theorist.

In the conflict theorist worldview, most public problems are caused not by errors or complexity, but by malice and oppression. The powerful few keep everyone else down. The solutions to injustice and suffering are simple and obvious: Defeat the powerful. Passion is more important than reason because the oppressed masses have to mobilize to storm the barricades. Debate is counterproductive because it dilutes passion and sows confusion. Discordant ideas are not there to inform; they are there to provide cover for oppression.

.. So I’d just ask them to take two courses. The first would be in revolutions — the French, Russian, Chinese and all the other ones that unleashed the passion of the mob in an effort to overthrow oppression — and the way they ALL wound up waist deep in blood.

The second would be in constitutionalism. We dump on lawyers, but the law is beautiful, living proof that we can rise above tribalism and force — proof that the edifice of civilizations is a great gift, which our ancestors gave their lives for.

Comments:

Starting with Ronald Reagan’s famous “the Government is the problem”, the Republican Party has systematically eliminated those members willing to engage in Mistake Theory reasoning. Republicans who engage in this dialog today are “RINOs”, but most started leaving the party in the 1980’s to become Independents or Democrats. What remains is a hard right party that has engaged in Conflict Theory for most of the last 9 years.

.. Our new generation was never taught how to communicate outside it’s own tribe. And failure to learn how to do that will not bode well for their future or ours.

.. I have spent my entire adult life on college campuses, and I would say that most students do not subscribe to mobbism or tribalism. Alas, I would say apathy is far more common than protest, and that most students are unlikely to know that Christina Hoff Sommers is even speaking on campus, to have an opinion about her ideas, or to attend. I see few protests, flyers, or petitions on campus these days. Instead, I see harried students who work part-time, struggle to pay tuition, and are anxious about landing a decent job when they graduate.